Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  There was always the chance, of course, that Duelle would come down with a shotgun and blow him away in that first second, but Guinness didn’t think it was much of a chance. By now, he thought, he knew his man, and Duelle would never have the balls.

  So that was the plan, and he stuck to it. He went right up to the front door and rang the bell. After a minute or so, when he had pushed the button a second time, a light went on upstairs—he could see it on the grass, although he stayed close to the door. And then, after perhaps another minute, the door opened.

  But the face he saw behind the safety chain was Kathleen’s.

  16

  What could either of them say? Guinness felt baffled and at the same time inexplicably ashamed as he watched Kathleen’s hands move slowly up to cover her mouth, her eyes closing and then opening again as if it were necessary to check the veracity of what they saw.

  And then the door closed, just for a second. He heard the chain slide loose from its catch, and then the door opened again and Kathleen squeezed through, and Guinness had to step back a quick half pace to keep from being slapped with the screen as it flew open, and then, before he understood what was happening, Kathleen had thrown her arms around him and he could feel her fingers pressing into his back. She was sobbing in short, ragged little bursts, terrible to hear, that made you think she was being pulled apart inside, and her head was pressed hard against his chest as if she wanted to confirm that his heart was really beating, that he was really there and not simply an apparition.

  Without having noticed that he had moved at all, Guinness suddenly found one of his hands resting gently on her hair. It was as soft as down, and he felt a curious sensation in his throat, a sudden thickness. He doubted that he would have been able to utter a sound.

  “Oh, God,” Kathleen wept, after a long pause in which she had seemed to be trying to speak, but couldn’t put the sounds together properly. “He said they’d killed you.”

  Guinness took her by the shoulders and, very gently, pushed her away until he held her nearly at arm’s length.

  “Not bloody likely,” he said quietly. He had found his voice, and it was hard as ice. “Where is he, Kathleen? I have business with your husband.”

  She only shook her head, her eyes welling up with tears; she didn’t seem to understand what the words meant. She was looking at the puffy, torn bruise on the side of his face.

  “Tell me where he is, Kathleen. It doesn’t get any easier this way.”

  Suddenly she was perfectly calm, almost casual. She brought her hands up and curled them over his forearms, and she seemed to smile at some private, inaccessible irony.

  “You’d better come inside.”

  He followed her into the kitchen and watched her as she ran water from the tap into a small yellow plastic coffeepot which she then carried over to a counter next to the stove and plugged into a wall socket. It had already begun to hiss menacingly before she had taken a pair of mugs down from a cabinet built into the corner. She didn’t ask him what he wanted; she simply dropped a couple of tea bags into the mugs. After all, they had been married once.

  “Sit down.”

  From the way she smiled it was obvious she had forgotten all about Duelle, as if he had never existed. Guinness took one of the four chairs grouped around a circular breakfast table which was wrought iron painted white and covered with a glass top. He took the one closest to the window, which would have looked out onto the lake if the shade hadn’t been tightly drawn.

  When the tea was ready—his mug had milk and a teaspoon of sugar in it, precisely as it would have had all those years ago in their apartment in London—she came over and sat down with him, putting her elbow on the table and her chin in the palm of her hand. She was wearing a gold nylon bathrobe, padded and stitched all over in a diamond pattern and reaching all the way to the floor, and her hair was loose around her face, a wisp or two straying down over her cheek, making her look like a sleepy child. She seemed intensely youthful; they might have been husband and wife again. The decade between what they were and what they had been might, in that instant, have been obliterated.

  But it hadn’t been. Guinness stared down at his tea, not touching it, conscious that he was in another man’s house, sitting at another man’s table. Kathleen belonged to someone else—or, at least, not to him.

  So what? He picked up the mug and drank, almost recklessly, as if it proved something. And why the hell shouldn’t he? It was late and he had had a rough day; he was tired and could use something to make him feel better. He could use all kinds of things: the love of a good woman, which twice in one lifetime he had had and had lost. Other things too: the safety of his only daughter, a face that didn’t throb like a rotten tooth, twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep. A day without fear. It was a long list.

  He would settle for the tea, however. For the moment, the tea and one other little thing.

  “Where is he, Kathleen?” He set the mug down and folded his hands on the table in front of him. He was prepared to wait for an answer.

  Kathleen seemed puzzled, as if she would have liked to tell him, if only just to make him happy, but couldn’t recollect. Couldn’t even recollect to whom, in this case, the pronoun “he” could refer.

  “Gone.” There—she had said it. Now, was that enough?

  From her expression they might have been talking about the paperboy.

  “Gone where, Kathleen? Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head, as if slightly annoyed at this childish persistence of his. “Why? Does it matter? He won’t be back.”

  Well, and perhaps it didn’t matter. Duelle would keep, he supposed. It wasn’t as if there were some particular hurry.

  Kathleen’s hands covered his own and then slipped inside so that her fingers rested against his hollow palms. He leaned forward, and their lips just brushed before she had brought her arms up and drawn them around his neck. She didn’t cry this time—she barely seemed to breathe—but there was a tension in that embrace suggesting some fear that she might. She seemed to have forgotten everything but that they were together again. The past really was restored.

  “Oh, dear God, Ray,” she whispered, her mouth buried in the side of his throat, “when he told me, I thought I’d die too. I don’t know how I’ve lived since then. Oh, God, I’ve missed you so much.”

  There was too much to sort out, too much to be understood. Guinness didn’t even try. The woman in his arms, the wife of his youth, his only love from that day to this—his mind and his heart had no room except for her. Like a man satisfying an old hunger, he held her to him, loving the smell of her and the warmth of her hair, loving the sound of her voice. She filled him up, making him feel tender and strong, as if he must be terribly, terribly careful not to crush her under his massive gentleness. He didn’t care about anything except her.

  “Your poor face.” As she drew a little away from him, the tips of her fingers resting lightly on his swollen cheek, her voice was still almost no louder than a sigh. “Shouldn’t you put something on it? How did you ever manage to get away?” The second question followed so quickly on the first that Guinness could only laugh.

  “No,” he said, taking her hand in his own and kissing the thumb, “there’s nothing that needs doing. I’ll just try to stay out of bar fights for the next couple of months, and everything ’ll be fine again.

  “Did Duelle tell you that I’d been killed?”

  She nodded, and Guinness cracked a wry smile, suggestive of his opinions on the lurid fears of amateurs. He explained, in broad and misleading outline, what had happened. It had all been an enormous misunderstanding, the sort of thing that happened every day between agents of competing government bureaucracies. “He only meant to sweat me a little; there was never any danger of anybody ending up dead. Duelle’s just been watching too many television movies.”

  Glad that he had lied, Guinness started to work on finishing his tea. It gave him an excuse not to look at her
for a moment, to let whatever questions might lurk in her eyes be unanswered and forgotten. There was nothing to be gained by frightening her, and he hadn’t felt like explaining what a rough, tough, All American Boy he’d been—he didn’t have the feeling she would have been impressed.

  “Is that why he isn’t here—because he told you he’d set me up?”

  Yes, that was why. “I threw him out,” she said calmly. “I told him I couldn’t bear to have him under the same roof with me another minute; I said I’d call the police if he didn’t leave that instant. I don’t know where he is now, and I don’t care.” Suddenly her eyes grew large and haggard, full of humiliation and the suffering of remorse, and she covered her face with her hands, precisely as she had done when she had first seen him through the crack in her open front door.

  “How could I have done it, Ray? How could I ever have married such a man?”

  Guinness smiled—hell, what did she expect him to do?—and slipped an arm around the back of her neck, drawing her toward him until their foreheads touched.

  “I don’t know, chickie, but you never were too sharp about picking husbands.”

  But in general shape, at least, how she had rid herself of this last one was obvious enough. You only had to know the man a little to realize that when he felt himself alone, utterly alone, and being drawn deeper and deeper into a dangerous and criminal chicane, he would have to turn to someone. It was not conscience that had made him spill his guts to his wife, apparently blind to the fact that she had been the first among his victims, but fear. He was cut off then, baiting Firbank’s hook all by himself, and it had been too much for him; he would have to unload to someone. Kathleen was at hand. You wondered what comfort or forgiveness he could have expected from her.

  Firbank had been right. Little Duelle was very much the confessional type.

  “I couldn’t believe it.” The words were spoken through clenched teeth, almost to herself. “I knew he was weak—I’d always known that—and I’d thought I’d never be surprised again at anything anyone could tell me he had done, not after what I’d learned yesterday morning. But who could have imagined murder?”

  “I don’t really think he believed that was where it was heading, Katey,” he said, wondering why he should think Duelle’s not knowing would have made any difference. “Not before, not when he still could have backed out.”

  “You don’t think so?” Her expression was almost pitying, as if she were touched by his naiveté. It was several seconds before either of them spoke again.

  Guinness got up from the table and started rummaging through the refrigerator; he was damned hungry, he decided, and—what the hell—breakfast was still a couple of hours away. It seemed like forever.

  He found a foil wrapped brick of cheddar cheese and held it up to view.

  “You mind?”

  She laughed and shook her head. “There are some wheat crackers in the cupboard over the toaster. Would you like some more tea?”

  The answer was yes, of course, and Kathleen ran water into the plastic coffeepot and started getting out paper napkins and silverware and a couple of plates, along with a half empty jar of peanut butter—in their London days, decent peanut butter had been the great and unobtainable delicacy, and Kathleen had never cared much for cheese—and they sat down to a little feast together.

  Aside from a slight pulling sensation just under the hinge of his jaw when he chewed, he felt fine. Except for that he might have forgotten all about Duelle and the armies of the shady night. He might have forgotten, except for the way Kathleen, only just once in a while, when she thought he wouldn’t notice, kept searching his face.

  He remembered how, at the end of their marriage, after she had found out the real character of those little trips to the Continent he had taken on an average of five or six times a year, how she had looked at him then, as if she had suddenly discovered that he wasn’t a man at all, that he really belonged in a cage at the zoological gardens. There was something of that same look now.

  “Ray,” she said at last, “would you have killed him? If I hadn’t been here instead, would you have killed him?”

  “You mean, would I have made your lord and master another mark on my scorecard?” He grinned unpleasantly. “Would you even believe me if I said no?”

  It was an unfair question, and he really didn’t hold it against Kathleen that she seemed to shrink a little under the pressure of his gaze. Still, he couldn’t regret making her uncomfortable. Maybe he did belong in a cage, but what business was that of hers? It had been a long time since she had forfeited the privilege of looking down her nose at him—she had had her little say on that score.

  “No, I wouldn’t have killed him.” Guinness cut off another quarter inch thick square of cheddar cheese and placed it delicately on top of a Triscuit. “Difficult as this may be for you to understand, I don’t drop the hammer on people purely for my own amusement. Your husband isn’t one of my favorite guys, but nothing in the task at hand requires that I do anything more than ask him a few questions. I don’t suppose he’ll be just wild about the way I put them, but my superiors don’t like excessive carnage—they consider it unprofessional to murder someone just because he’s annoyed you—so for the time being Duelle’s life is perfectly safe from me.”

  The cracker and cheese together took about two bites, and he sat at the table making himself another, seemingly oblivious to Kathleen’s chilly silence. He wiped off the tips of his fingers on his napkin, one at a time, being careful not to look up.

  “Why? Are you disappointed?”

  Kathleen wasn’t the type of woman who loses her temper; her style ran rather to the slow, contemptuous sidelong glance and the withdrawal into silence. She wasn’t a battler—you couldn’t imagine her throwing dinner plates, for instance—she simply refused to have anything to do with you once you had proved yourself unworthy of her perfect trust and confidence. One of the ways you did that, apparently, was to suggest that she had rather been looking forward to having you put her husband’s lights out for him.

  As he sat at her breakfast table, making himself another cheese covered Triscuit, regarding her wooden profile, Guinness reflected that he had never, in all the years of their marriage, hit upon a tactic to counter these chilly and seemingly unbreakable silences. It had always seemed to him that the last moments of their union had finally arrived, that there could never be any solution to the present impasse, and that presently she would rise majestically from her seat and stalk into the next room, like a Wagnerian heroine, to phone the divorce lawyer. It didn’t seem to matter what he had done, whether insulted her lineage or tried to pick up a chicken thigh with his fingers, once he had crossed that invisible line between decent behavior and bestiality all he could do was to hang on and wait for things to blow over.

  In the final crisis, when he had stood revealed as a murderer and fraud, then they had both been trapped. That was something that simply never would blow over. They had had to face it and somehow to deal with it, and that was something they somehow couldn’t manage to do. When the strain had ultimately become unbearable, Kathleen had just packed her bags and disappeared.

  But it had been eight years since then, Guinness reminded himself. She was somebody else’s wife now, and there wasn’t a reason in the world why he should give one damn what she thought of him. This time, he didn’t see himself as having any stake in how things turned out.

  “Isn’t that why you’re still here, Kathleen?” He smiled, stirring a spoonful of sugar noisily into his tea. “Didn’t you stick around just so you could make sure justice was done by wicked old Duelle? Maybe you didn’t absolutely have it in mind for me to do it for you, but I don’t doubt you thought you’d make one hundred percent sure he got what was coming to him before you boarded the plane back to Seattle.”

  It didn’t take an advanced degree in psychology to see that he had hit a nerve—the fair Miss Frigidaire was beginning by imperceptible stages to turn to sludge. Undernea
th the smooth skin, the muscles of her throat were growing taught and ropelike, and one corner of her mouth had developed an almost invisible twitch. Poor baby. After all, the wrongs done her hadn’t been small; maybe she had a right to her pound of the worthy professor’s quivering flesh.

  “What’d you have in mind—getting the goods on him and then going to the cops with it? Let me clue you, it’s a little late in the day for that; the way things have developed, no one would be interested.”

  He got up from the table and started to rinse his hands off in the sink. It was something to do and it kept his back to her. She wouldn’t be any the worse for a few moments of privacy while she tried to find her way clear, if she could, of this particular unpleasant truth.

  That was the terrible thing about revenge, the mainspring of its intricacy, that it forced you to learn to be terrible. You didn’t get to keep your hands clean. You had to play in the mud like everybody else.

  “I don’t know what I thought I’d do,” she said finally.

  Her voice sounded hollow and remarkably distant, like a whisper that had been carried for miles on a breath of air. Guinness turned the water off but still kept his back to her; he wanted to hear, and he knew if he turned around, and she had to meet his eyes, it would stop her cold and they both might never know. “I suppose I just wanted to—I don’t know, perhaps I’d just had enough of leaving things behind me when they’d gone the wrong way. I just thought—”

  Guinness picked up the dish towel that lay on the counter beside him and stood drying his hands. Very carefully, inspecting the joints of his knuckles, as if they were the sliding hinges of some expensive and complicated machine he had taken apart to oil.

  “I know—I mean, I understand. But whatever it was, the best thing would be just to forget about it. Believe me, I know. You don’t really feel any better afterward.”

  He turned slightly, only enough to be not quite facing her, and looked up. They didn’t smile when their eyes met. It wasn’t like that. It was simply that they seemed to understand something about each other, about themselves, in a way that had never been possible before. It was the reconciliation that can only take place long after it’s too late to patch anything up between you. It was the second chance after there’s nothing left anymore to lose.